Amazing return on investment for buying a president

Ales Samuels of Daily Kos reported that Kari Lake struck a deal for One America News to have its propaganda broadcast through Voice of America and other networks that are a part of the US Agency for Global Media. Lake is currently a “senior presidential advisor.” Twice she lost major elections in Arizona. By major I think it was governor, then senator. Both time she made a pest of herself by not conceding, claiming the vote was somehow rigged, and filing lawsuits that she lost. She’s definitely part of the MAGA crowd and a resume like that would definitely please the nasty guy. Who Lake negotiated with to make this deal is not reported. It seems she is not on the staff or board of VOA, USAGM, or has any role beyond “senior advisor.” Voice of America was created during the Soviet years so that countries behind the Iron Curtain could hear some truthful news. That’s why the nasty guy gutted it and it is currently off the air. He also gutted USAGM. The fates of both are in the courts. One America News was founded in 2013 because Fox News wasn’t sufficiently far-right. It produces only propaganda, including the false claims by the nasty guy after the 2020 election. It has been dropped by nearly every major cable and satellite provider and has quietly settled defamation cases. This deal is likely to go before the courts as well. Steve Herman, chief national correspondent for VOA, told The Washington Post that laws prevent VOA from being the voice of the left or the voice of the right and that USAGM cannot dictate VOA content. The nasty guy has taken over The Kennedy Center. He has appointed the vice nasty to whitewash the Smithsonian museums (though that work appears to still be in the planning stages and I don’t want to know his plans for the Museum of African American History and Culture). Bill Addis of the Kos community reported what’s next in his sights is the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The museum’s board has 68 members, 55 of them appointed by the president. The nasty guy has now fired 14 of them, all of them closely associated with Biden and appointed by him. The top name of those fired is Doug Emhoff, a Jewish man and husband to Kamala Harris. You can guess the type of people the nasty guy appointed as replacements. A week ago, when there were lots of media people talking about the nasty guy’s first hundred days, Lisa Needham of Kos talked about what Musk got out of those hundred days. Most of us feel we are getting screwed. Musk did quite well, amazing payback for buying a president. Nice to be able twist the government in your favor. Needham has a tally of his return on investment. + Biden dedicated $42 billion for Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. The intended method is fiber-optic internet. The government is rewriting the rules to eliminate the “bias in favor of fiber” so that Musk’s Starlink could be considered, even though it is slower, more expensive than fiber, and Musk has a reputation of underdelivering. + Starlink appears to have bumped Verizon aside to upgrade the communications platform of the Federal Aviation Administration. The contract is $2.4 billion. + There is talk of a Golden Dome for the US, similar to the Patriot missile defense system in Israel. Musk’s SpaceX wants to be a part of it. Yeah, this idea has been kicking around since Reagan’s Star Wars plan, and no one has been able to get it to work for a country of our size. The contract size is unknown but in the billions. + Telescope launch services for NASA might be something SpaceX can actually do well. But since Musk is in the government this is a conflict of interest. Contract size a mere $100 million. + Launch services for the military, again a conflict of interest. Contract size is close to $6 billion. + Shutting down government investigations into his businesses. There are “at least 65 actual or potential actions by 11 different federal agencies,” according to estimates by Sen. Richard Blumenthal. An example of an action is an investigation into Tesla’s shoddy self-driving technology. Potential savings is $2.37 billion. + Free advertising, though it didn’t pan out. Having the nasty guy promote Teslas in front of the White House didn’t help sinking sales. + The news has been full of DOGE gaining access to various government data systems. Some stories also talk of data being sent out of government offices. Government data: priceless. Pretty good payback for buying the president for the low prices of a quarter billion. Yesterday Oliver Willis of Kos worked from a WaPo to report the nasty guy is using leverage when a country wants to negotiate a reduction in tariffs (which I think are the “reciprocal” tariffs that haven’t gone into effect yet). That leverage appears to be a demand the country purchase goods and services from Musk in exchange for a reduction in tariffs. The example is the small African nation of Lesotho. It has a population of 2.2 million and its economy is ranked 164th in the world, a tiny economy. It has little to offer the nasty guy. He announced a 50% tariff against it. Lesotho agreed to sign a contract to license Starlink. Willis did not report what effect the contract had on Lesotho’s tariffs.

Several other countries facing tariff pressure also signed deals with Starlink: India, Vietnam, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Other nations may also be facing pressure from Team Trump to hand off money to Musk while their economies suffer. ... The public disgust with Musk’s influence—he is the richest person in the world—is unlikely to dissipate with the revelation that his wealth is being increased as part of the tariff process.

The corruption is thick and sticking to everything. The nasty guy froze more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University. That prompted A Martínez of NPR to talk to Teddy Schleifer, a New York Times reporter of philanthropy and political power, about whether billionaires’ checkbooks can fill in the gap. The discussion was a week ago. Short answer: Billionaires and their foundations simply do not have enough money to cover all the money the nasty guy is freezing. That’s especially true when other government expenditures, such as USAID, are also frozen. Schleifer added that though places like Harvard are private and not accountable to the public, they take plenty of public funding. And that gives the nasty guy leverage to make them beg or bend the knee. Since a great number of colleges and universities take federal money he has a lot of leverage. Another problem with billionaires covering the gap is if they said much in public about it their gifts would turn the nasty guy’s ire from the schools to them. A third problem is replacing federal money with billionaire money replaces federal meddling (which didn’t use to be much of a bad thing) with billionaire meddling. Is that better or worse than letting the educational institution wither away? This question has been around for a long time. For a while in America we have been making higher education and the better jobs that come from it available to all. I see a big effort (which has been going on for a few decades) to restrict higher ed (and in some cases K-12 ed) and the better jobs to the children of those already rich. The College of Cardinals took less than 24 hours and (if I heard about all smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney) only three ballots. There are a lot of news sources with lots of stories about Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who has become Pope Leo XIV. There is also a great deal of speculation about why he was chosen and how much he’ll follow the example Pope Francis set out. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted some of those takes. One is by Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service:

As Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost walked out on the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday (May 8) and took the name Pope Leo XIV, Steven P. Millies’ initial reaction was a mixture of elation and disbelief. A professor at Catholic Theological Union — a seminary Prevost, a Chicago native, attended — Millies was overjoyed at the idea of a pontiff from so close to home. “It’s incredible to me that we have a Southsider who’s the pope,” Millies said of the first U.S.-born bishop of Rome. But Millies also had another thought: By electing Leo, the College of Cardinals was, as Millies put it, “taking a side” in global politics — including U.S. politics.

On a different topic Dworkin quoted Bloomberg Politics:

President Donald Trump’s expansive use of executive power faced at least 328 lawsuits as of May 1 — with judges halting his policies far more often than they allowed them. Courts entered more than 200 orders stopping the administration’s actions in 128 cases, with judges sometimes ruling at multiple stages of the legal fights. Judges had allowed contested policies to go ahead in 43 cases, and hadn’t ruled yet in more than 140 others. Most cases are in the early stages, and new ones are being filed daily. The court battles are testing the balance of power at the heart of American democracy. Trump and his supporters have attacked judges as biased, and his administration has been accused of failing to fully comply with orders. Bloomberg found that his court losses — and wins — came from a mix of appointees of Democratic and Republican presidents, including some nominated by Trump during his first term.